1. Field of Invention
The invention concerns a conveyor device for the loading or unloading of separable piece goods from a storage area or to a storage area. Such conveyor devices are used, e.g., to deliver packages or luggage items of various size and/or shape, which need to be delivered from a storage area to further transport in another transport means, such as in the loading and unloading of cargo holds of airplanes. The piece goods are often arranged with no particular order in different positions of a cargo hold and need to be passed on to a transport means or conversely taken from a transport means and placed in the storage area.
Such delivery of separable piece goods is therefore hard to automate and often requires the use of human labor, who hand off piece goods of different size, different weight, and different category between a conveyor belt and a transport means of a warehousing logistics. This is time consuming, labor intensive, and prone to error. Furthermore, only limited piece counts per unit of time can be achieved.
2. Description of Related Art
Therefore, there have been efforts in the prior art to promote an automation of such delivery of piece goods. For example, EP 2 156 927 B1 indicates a conveyor device with a robot with three telescoping arms at a front free end of the conveyor device. The robot is mounted on a kind of bridge, between which a conveyor belt runs for the further transport of the piece goods picked up. However, such a solution has drawbacks in terms of the conveyance speed, since the receiving of piece goods with telescoping arms has to be done each time on the conveyor belt. Furthermore, the bridge spanning the conveyor belt greatly restricts the structural space. From EP 1 667 907 B1 there is known a conveyor device comprising a first, second and third conveyor module, which are connected to each other via an intermediate conveyor device. The conveyor device disclosed there involves an optimization of a hand-off between different conveyor modules thanks to an intermediate conveyor device with corresponding means for the hand-off to the further transport of the piece goods. A sideways adjustment of the transport direction of the receiving means at the front free end of the conveyor device is not described, so that the vehicle carrying the conveyor device has to be repositioned appropriately each time in order to receive variously arranged piece goods with no particular ordering from a cargo space. In US 2007/284214 A1 a conveyor device with the features of the preamble of claim 1 is described.